BrailleType: Unleashing Braille over Touch Screen Mobile Phones

Abstract

Abstract. The emergence of touch screen devices poses a new set of challenges regarding text-entry. These are more obvious when considering blind people, as touch screens lack the tactile feedback they are used to when interacting with devices. The available solutions to enable non-visual text-entry resort to a wide set of targets, complex interaction techniques or unfamiliar layouts. We propose BrailleType, a text-entry method based on the Braille alphabet. BrailleType avoids multi-touch gestures in favor of a more simple single-finger interaction, featuring few and large targets. We performed a user study with fifteen blind subjects, to assess this method's performance against Apple's VoiceOver approach. BrailleType although slower, was significantly easier and less error prone. Results suggest that the target users would have a smoother adaptation to BrailleType than to other more complex methods.

BlindLogin: A Graphical Authentication System with Support for Blind and Visually Impaired users on Smartphones

“…2), a reasonably secure graphical password system which is universally more usable because it supports the blind and visually impaired users as it works well with TalkBack, an Accessibility software option in the Android smartphone. As touchscreens in mobile phones lack the tactile feedback most blind users are used to (Oliveira et al, 2011), BlindLogin supports both haptic and sound tactons as secondary feedback cues for the blind and visually impaired when logging into the system. These tactons aid new users to reduce errors and help the new users to memorize the layout and features of the new system (Yfantidis and Evreinov, 2006).…”

Especificação e desenvolvimento de um ambiente educativo móvel para a prática da escrita Braille

“…O GBraille Keyboard foi, então, desenvolvido com base em outra abordagem, o TypeInBraille [Oliveira 2011]. Sua forma de funcionamento permite que um símbolo Braille seja inserido em três passos e com múltiplos toques, deixando mais rápido o processo de escrita.…”

An evaluation of BrailleTouch

“…Oliveira et al presented BrailleType, where the user sequentially enters one dot at a time and signals the end of the braille character with a double tap [21]. Its speed was 1.45 wpm with 9.7% error.…”

“…Oliveira et al and Azenkot et al both evaluated accessible soft QWERTY keyboards, similar to Apple's VoiceOver split-tap keyboard for the iPhone [1,21]. In the split-tap interaction, the first tap produces a voiced output of the character under the finger and a second tap selects the character.…”

“…Similar to other braille text entry studies [1,18,21], we employed Grade 1 braille, which uses one braille chord for each character. While we initially thought that contracted braille was just convenient shorthand, our participants informed us that contracted braille has the significance of a language within the blind community.…”